Category Archives: Open Access

Young Scientists Design Open-Source Program at NASA

Young Scientists Design Open-Source Program at NASA:

The program was launched quietly last year under NASA’s CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler, 28, and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, 25, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said.

“NASA is recognizing the value of free and open-source software in other sectors,” said Cowan-Sharp, a contractor at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. “CosmosCode is going one step further by allowing NASA scientists to begin a software project in the public domain, leveraging the true value of open-source software by creating an active community of volunteers.”

CosmosCode is indicative of a larger shift at NASA toward openness and transparency — things for which complex and bureaucratic government labs are not known. The software project is part of CoLab, an effort to invite the public to help NASA scientists with various engineering problems. NASA is also digging into its files from previous missions and releasing code that until now remained behind closed doors. Together, these projects are creating a sort of SourceForge for space.

Related: CosmosCode – Second Life Intern – NASA CoLab

The sub-$1,000 UAV Project

The sub-$1,000 UAV project by Chris Anderson:

This summer my project will be to come up with a set of resources and instructions that will allow regular non-engineer people (and kids) to put together a drone for less than $1,000 that has most if not all of the functionality of this $10,000 beauty. The DraganFlyer autonomous helicopter platform shown above starts at just $2,400, and these guys seem to have made good progress on the essentials of a $500 helicopter UAV

Very cool. Hopefully we can post an update on the progress.

Albatross is an open source unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) project (March 21st, 2007: “unfortunately this project has to be put on hold… We are seeking opportunities to combine our work to date with other ongoing UAV research and projects, before it becomes hopelessly obsolete”). Paparazzi is an open source project for an autopilot system.

Bdelloid Rotifers Abandoned Sex 100 Million Years Ago

Who Needs Sex (or Males) Anyway? by Liza Gross:

If you own a birdbath, chances are you’re hosting one of evolutionary biology’s most puzzling enigmas: bdelloid rotifers. These microscopic invertebrates—widely distributed in mosses, creeks, ponds, and other freshwater repositories—abandoned sex perhaps 100 million years ago, yet have apparently diverged into nearly 400 species. Bdelloids (the “b” is silent) reproduce through parthenogenesis, which generates offspring with essentially the same genome as their mother from unfertilized eggs.

Scientists stumped by 100m years of chastity

Bdelloid rotifers are egg laying microscopic invertebrates — widely distributed in mosses, streams and ponds — which have managed to diverge into nearly 400 species without a scintilla of sex… Now a new study, published today in the journal PLoS biology, has confirmed the worst fears of scientists: the rotifers do indeed present a major challenge to the assumption that sex is necessary for organisms to diversify into species.
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Rather than mixing up DNA, creatures like the bdelloid rotifers can evolve solely through the build-up of mutations that occur in the ‘cloning’ process when a new rotifer is born. The new study proves that these differences are not random and can help rotifers adapt to a different environment, such as the legs or chest of a water louse. Bdelloids can be found happily swimming around in a puddle in your garden, hot springs or in freezing ponds in the Antarctic.

Open Access Journal Wars

Open Access Launches Journal Wars

The $10 billion science publishing industry hasn’t heard the last of a bill that would make publicly funded studies available for free. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has pledged this year to resurrect the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695), which would require federally funded research to become publicly available online within six months of being published.

“When it’s the taxpayers that are underwriting projects in the federal government, they deserve to access the very things they’re paying for,” said Cornyn spokesman Brian Walsh. “This research is funded by American taxpayers and conducted by researchers funded by public institutions. But it’s not widely available.”

Great. The idea that people will actually buy some crazy excuse like: “It’s inappropriate for the government (to interfere).” as a reason that publicly funded research should be kept from the public is frustrating. And even more so because some people actually might buy it. But for those that can think, I believe it confirms that they have no good arguments against proposal. If the best argument for opposition to open access requirements is trying to confuse people into thinking something that makes no logical sense they must not have any good reasons.

Is there any part of “you must make the research openly available” that is interfering with the science involved? Interfering with an outdated business model maybe, but that is all. And really not even that because you can retain that business model if you want. I can’t see how anyone can sensibly argue that it is in the interest of science to keep information inaccessible.

Online Mathematics Textbooks

Online Mathematics Textbooks:

The writing of textbooks and making them freely available on the web is an idea whose time has arrived. Most college mathematics textbooks attempt to be all things to all people and, as a result, are much too big and expensive. This perhaps made some sense when these books were rather expensive to produce and distribute–but this time has passed.

A few years ago when I first posted a list of mathematics textbooks freely available on line, there existed only a handful of such books. Now there are many.

Including: Calculus by Gilbert Strang – Linear Algebra, Infinite Dimensions, and Maple by James Herod – Euclid’s Elements – Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David J. C. MacKay

Bionanotechnology Future

Commercialization and Future Developments in Bionanotechnology by Marcel P. Bruchez:

The lack of specifiability of our modules was a key challenge to commercialization. Specification will require detailed basic investigations of the properties and chemistry of nanoparticle materials in biological systems. In addition, we will have to establish analytical tools and quantitative descriptors to detail the distribution of properties present in a population of nanoparticles. This is categorically different from specification for organic molecules and proteins, in which properties can be effectively described by an average. In nanomaterials, performance properties may be dominated by a relatively small population of particles, so averaging cannot always be used.

Interesting paper, from The Bridge, an open-access publication of the National Academy of Engineering. This issue includes papers from the 12th U.S. Frontiers of Engineering including: New Mobility: The Next Generation of Sustainable Urban Transportation and Creating Intelligent Agents in Games.

Anger at Anti-Open Access PR

Blog posts angry at the anti open access moves by science journals are exploding. Which is a good thing; hopefully the momentum will keep up and some real changes will take place.

Those with money to lose will fight against freedom of information by Bora Zivkovic, is pretty representative:

While the world is moving towards an Open Science model of exchange of scientific information, there are, as expected, forces that are trying to oppose it. Whenever there is a movement to change any kind of system, those most likely to lose will make a last-ditch and nasty effort to temporarily derail the progress.

More: My advice to the American Chemical Society – Big Content’s ‘pitbull’ and the AAA – Science Journals Hire “PR Pit Bull” – Traditional science publishers hire PR firms to scuttle open access – The Open Access “Debate” – A quick bit on the future of Open Access Publishing, Anthropology, and Public Relations – More on the AAP PR campaign – Anti-Open Access Propaganda: An Institution Under Siege – Science publishers get stupid

Good. Go blogosphere, Go Open Access and Go Badgers, too.

The Future of the Scholarly Journal

Publishing Group Hires ‘Pit Bull of PR’:

Those groups, along with many members of Congress, want to make the published results of federally financed medical research freely available to the public whose taxes funded the work — results that today are typically available only to journal subscribers or to people willing to pay expensive per-page fees.

The publishing association, which includes among its members some of the world’s biggest and most profitable scientific journals, has argued that free Internet access to the publicly funded portion of their contents would undermine their subscription bases. Lacking that income, they claim, they would not be able to do the invisible, unsung but important, work of screening out bad science and publishing and archiving the very best.

As I have said before, this information should be publicly available. The funding mechanism for peer review needs to change. If the Journals want to stay in business they need to find a way to add value that doesn’t keep public funded information from the public.

Webcasts by Chemistry and Physics Nobel Laureates

Designed to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists, The Honeywell – Nobel Initiative establishes a forum for students worldwide to learn directly from Nobel Laureates in Chemistry and Physics.

The Honeywell – Nobel Initiative includes a large number of short podcasts by Nobel prize winners, such as:

Leon Lederman explains that there is a flaw in current quantum theory. He describes how the Higgs particle would provide information to refine the theory…

Steven Chu describes how he and other scientists use lasers to manipulate atoms in order to answer fundamental questions in quantum physics…

The temperature of the earth is increasing. Mario Molina discusses the consequences of this phenomenon caused by human activity…

Students must be taught the value of science at an early age. Richard Schrock considers helping students to appreciate the contributions of science and to inspire…

The site is pretty and the videos are excellent but once again they offer an example of a site that fails to follow basic web usability practices. You can’t link to the location of these collections of webcasts easily. If you have trouble finding them, which I image some will – click on the links to “video lab.”

MIT for Free

How to go to M.I.T. for free by Gregory M. Lamb:

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world’s most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won’t have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It’s all free of charge.

The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn.
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MIT’s OCW website features even more glowing feedback from learners. “[B]ecause of money, many good students with great talent and [who are] diligent do not have the chance to learn the newest knowledge and understanding of the universe,” says Chen Zhiying, a student in the People’s Republic of China. “But now, due to the OCW, the knowledge will spread to more and more people, and it will benefit the whole [world of] human-beings.”